Research on high-speed railway network capacity utilisation and optimisation

Abstract

Fast, frequent, direct and favourable time railway travels are the common goal of passenger railways, which has been summarised as three challenges: balancing direct services and transfers, managing the trade-off between coverage and short travel times, and addressing scheduling complexities across different national railway contexts after analysing worldwide cases and related railway planning stages. A research focus on line planning, timetable generation, and platforming is therefore established.This thesis proposes a review framework for capacity in passenger railways, covering concepts, influencing factors, measurement, and passenger evaluation. Both train paths and timespan have their own suitable scenarios. Open tracks and platform numbers are the most critical factors for mesoscopic modelling. Measuring capacity through timetabling aligns with the research goal and includes key capacity-related passenger experience aspects such as availability and travel time. Following this, this thesis proposes a capacity-related service scheduling process for China’s High-Speed Railway (HSR) by systematically analysing network management approaches, passenger characteristics, and operational factors for regional and long-distance HSR. Centralising congested HSR sections is regarded as the approach of determining train densities across other parts of the network. Origin and Destination (OD) groups are discussed as the suitable dimension for describing passenger behaviours and demand features. Operational factors are classified into attributes and timetabling details, and dwell time and overtaking are recognised as crucial for a short timetable timespan. Offering transfers for cross-line trains moving in the opposing direction at busy nodes could potentially benefit passengers. As service scheduling problem containing line planning, timetable generation and platforming. It first divides the line planning into two stages. The first stage is a selective work which minimises interchange locations using a weighted maximum spanning tree approach. The second stage optimises service frequency for OD pairs through a weighted set covering problem. The objective is to minimise both the number of intermediate stops and operational costs, while meeting service requirements for different OD. The analysis shows that offering flexibility in train services (fast, semi-fast, and local trains) allows each OD pair to benefit from shorter travel times. This thesis then introduces an integrated timetable generation and platforming mesoscopic model that uses train path flow balance, time-mapping, and precedence constraints. The advantage of the model’s structure is verified against macroscopic models. A heuristic algorithm is developed to generate feasible timetables for large-scale networks efficiently. The analysis reveals that the number of platforms plays a more significant role in reducing timespan than overtaking rules. Additionally, adding extra stops on fast trains brings certain levels of extra passenger benefit without extending the timespan. This thesis is the first to propose classifying cross-line train movements into following and opposing types, and the trade-off is defined as the potential affected train path number.In short, this thesis provides a rich theoretical framework for railway capacity in academic research and an integrated capacity management solution that encompasses a wide range of factors, detailed operational levels, and feasible methods for real-world railway operations.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jiaxi Li: orcid.org/0000-0001-6298-5747

ORCID for John Preston: orcid.org/0000-0002-6866-049X

ORCID for John Armstrong: orcid.org/0000-0002-2648-6307

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